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Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results
- s3r3nity 8y agoWow - Services grew 27% year-on-year to $10bn! For comparison, AWS made about $6.8bn in Q3. That's bananas. And it's more than just Apple Music / iCloud storage; it's the "ecosystem lock-in" and the glue that keeps folks from bouncing away from Apple hardware. Congrats to the team!
- FireBeyond 8y ago"Congrats to the team" for their effective "ecosystem lock-in"? Congrats to them for effecting a 30% tax? "Please sir, may I have another?"
- Gorbzel 8y agoCongrats for actually creating an ecosystem worth using.
- drb91 8y ago...for some people, for some ends.
- lucisferre 8y agoYeah, we get it, people who don't use Apple products exist. Not particularly relevant to the discussion though.
- drb91 8y agoIt’s still worth noting that apple does not meet every need if people are making carte blanche value statements.
- inscionent 8y agoVery true. The comment that started this branch just derailed the conversation by mocking apple developers/users, but if phrased as the first part of your statement, could have been useful discourse.
- drb91 8y agoI think the conversation was derailed plenty by offering congratulations to people for successfully making money.
- JaggerFoo 8y agoMoron
- jimbokun 8y agoYes, I'm long AAPL.
- ariwilson 8y agoIsn't that increase primarily charging Google more for exclusive search access (e.g. "platform tax")? http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-engine/ http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-eng...
- Steko 8y agoApple Music has gotta be a big chunk of the increase. It was at 17 million subscribers in Sep-17 and was at 50 million in May-18 so that's +$1B a quarter right there.
- tanilama 8y agoIt depends on what counts as services...
- soccerdave 8y agoAmazon really missed the boat when they came out with their crappy phone attempt. They could have invested more money and made some decent hardware instead of trying to do something gimmicky. They still haven't really learned though by launching poorly designed Kindle Fires with low res screens that lag a bunch. I wonder how different it would be if Amazon had launched a device like the Pixel as a phone.
- ambicapter 8y agoMaybe, and this is just a guess, making good hardware isn't actually that easy? Did they hire any pros or did they try to build the knowhow internally?
- ksec 8y agoIt really is easy, comparatively speaking with the current Shenzhen ecosystem. The problem with Amazon is exactly the same as Microsoft had in the 90s. They have no taste, and not in a small way but very big ways.
- innagadadavida 8y agoServices story is amazing. An area Apple could grow is host backend services for the 2M+ app developers out there.
- gordon_freeman 8y agoiPhone sales account for just 59% of overall revenue now. That's impressive figure the way Apple is diversifying its business from Hardware-focused to now Services-focused. By comparison, Google Search still accounts for around 86% of its revenues. Well done, Apple!
- adventured 8y ago$59.5b in net income ($70.9b in operating income) for the last four quarters, staggering. Their annual sales of $265b puts them ahead of the GDP of countries such as Portugal, New Zealand, Egypt and Finland.
- hop 8y ago.7 billion per day, mind blowing.
- mikestew 8y agoOne might say they're raking it in, but I do wonder how many people with rakes it would take to rake up 0.7 billion dollars per day. Top of my head says, "a small city". (Alright, back-of-the-napkin whizzes...)
- conanbatt 8y agoCan you imagine having the Money Mines, just the forever drudgery of moving money from one place to another, day in, day out, it never ends.
- why_only_15 8y agoTo make the number as big as we can, we can use pennies. $700M/day = $8101/s = 810,100 pennies @ 2.5g per = 2025kg or 2 metric tons of pennies per second. I honestly have no idea how many pennies a person can rake per second. Pennies are pretty small, so maybe a few thousand at a time with a special rake? I'm imagining that you would have to rake these pennies 100 meters at about 1 meter per second (average walking speed 1.4 - having to rake pennies), so we would have to be raking at any given time 100 seconds worth of pennies (=81M). If a given person can rake a few thousand at a time, then that's about 40,000 people, approximately a small city
- randyrand 8y agoAnd they do that with just 127,000 employees (but probably many more than that in contractors, suppliers, etc.) I wonder what the per capita GDP (or GCP? Gross Corporate Product) is of apple vs other companies/countries.
- genie514 8y agoI wonder at what price people will consider switching from iOS to Android. Seems like they sold an incredible number of iPhones at ASPs higher than analyst predictions.
- Synaesthesia 8y agoWhat Apple has realised is there is an entire class of people who simply don’t mind paying $70 a month or whatever it costs to have a new iPhone, even though they’re not competitive in price, it doesn’t matter, and so Apple gets to make these huge profits.
- anthonybsd 8y ago>even though they’re not competitive in price Explain to me how having the fastest silicone in the business is not "competitive" in price? I mean if you are the top dog, you kinda get to set the stage, no?
- DerekL 8y agoYou mean “silicon”, not “silicone”. (Or maybe you do mean “silicone”?)
- anthonybsd 8y agoRight you are, silicon. Thank you. Not caulking material :)
- Synaesthesia 8y agoThey do have the best silicone, and I was trying to explain why they get to set the price they do and get away with it. It’s just that, for example in South Africa the new iPhone XS costs R22000-24000 which is $1500 - the Samsungs and especially the Huawei’s are much cheaper. You can get a P20 lite for like R5000 which is an outstanding phone. But again many South Africans can afford the iPhone.
- bluedino 8y agoTim knows what he’s doing, keeping the Mac prices a couple hundred dollars higher than we’d like.
- aphextron 8y agoHe knows they can charge anything. When the iPhone X dropped at $999, even as a total iOS person with the money to afford it I scoffed. But I knew they would sell like crazy. Apple has a brand beyond any company's wildest imaginations. It could be $2k and people would still want the latest iPhone no matter what, if not just to be seen with it.
- aczerepinski 8y agoI certainly don't care about being seen with a cool phone, but for somebody like me who doesn't want Google tracking my every move, I don't see any alternative to iPhones. So yes, they can charge whatever they want and I don't have a choice.
- satya71 8y agoAlso, I factor my phone purchases as a per year cost. Apple is still supporting the iPhone 5s. I only have to replace Apple devices every 5 years. At that rate it's about $250 per year, which is better than any high end Android phone. Privacy is the main reason I get iOS devices, but the price is not bad.
- throwaway427 8y agoYup, I'll have had my 6S Plus for 3 years in December. With a new battery and the new OS it's still a very high end experience. 6S Plus was when they added optical image stabilization, so the camera is still pretty good too. Cost $1k brand new then and I'll probably drop the same $$ or more for a maxed out iPhone whatever in Dec 2019. If only their laptops were this high quality.
- 8y ago
- thecosas 8y agoSome pretty good charts here: https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/11/reminder-apple-financial-results-released-today/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/11/reminder-apple-financial-... Interested to see Asymco's take. He was super close on the vast majority of his predictions for this quarter according to his Twitter account (https://twitter.com/asymco https://twitter.com/asymco). Q1 looks like it's going to be bananas, especially with iPhone XR, new iPad Pros, new Macs, etc.
- krrrh 8y agoAn interesting counterpoint is that the stock is down ~5% in after hours trading on weak Q1 guidance. Apple’s guidance is always pretty conservative though, and the market hasn’t gotten used to it.
- synaesthesisx 8y agoThe market isn't always very intelligent - these are absolutely incredible numbers IMO
- Analemma_ 8y agoThe market is reacting to the announcement that Apple will no longer break out unit sales. Analysts hate having less information, and (rightfully, IMO) see it as a sign that sales growth is over.
- FighterMafia 8y ago*unit sales growth
- Cyph0n 8y agoDid he only include his prediction with the announced numbers? In general, if you do not want to release your numbers early, you can just tweet a signature or HMAC or even just a SHA-256 digest of your summarized predictions (in plaintext).
- samfisher83 8y agoI guess even if the phone sales stay flat they can raise the price and get more revenue/profits. This would a great economic experiment. How inelastic are iphone sales.
- bdcravens 8y agoI thought Apple was going to crumble because they no longer considered the needs of developers? /s
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoOh, for sure. The Pro users pissed off about the touchbar and lack of user-replaceable memory are the canary in the coalmine, you’ll see! Apple might be taking in billions per week now, but when all those Pro users stop telling their friends to buy Mac, it’s all over!
- pjmlp 8y agoThey consider the needs of their developer customers, that target Apple plarforms. Those that buy OS X to develop GNU/Linux software not so much. The days of red numbers are long gone.
- vizzah 8y agoAAPL just lost it's 1 trillion market cap. Ouch.
- philjohn 8y agoShare price going down after market when an earning release drops is hardly new.
- jballanc 8y agoWhat's volume? After-hours trading tends to be extremely light (and heavily restricted as to who may participate), so prices have a tendency to deviate from reality by quite a bit. Watch the futures if you want to know where AAPL will land in the morning.
- nappy 8y agoThis reminds me acutely of Jobs' criticism of Apple during the the Sculley/Spindler years: that the company got incredibly greedy and extracted as much value from its customers as possible, without fully delivering on that value.
- rgovostes 8y agoOn the services side of things, I pay Apple $8.50/mo for storage (split between family members, so really much less than that) for all of my photos and documents, and $7/mo for unlimited music (taking advantage of available discounts). For hardware, an iPhone XR is only $30 more than a Galaxy S9, and though it's not quite an even comparison hardware-wise, that $30 difference buys you about 5 years of software updates, a suite of great creativity and productivity apps, servers that sync and back up, etc. (You can probably get some of that list from Google or Samsung, in exchange for your privacy.) They could shrink their margins and have plenty, sure, but I'm not convinced that it's really such a bad deal for customers.
- bob_theslob646 8y ago>that $30 difference buys you about 5 years of software updates, a suite of great creativity and productivity apps, 5 years of software updates? Can you post a source on that?
- spronkey 8y agoThe S9 is also very expensive. Only a few years ago the ~$300 phones were awful. These days they're far better, and the flagships are well into the realm of diminishing returns.
- yeldarb 8y agoWhat's up with them no longer reporting units going forward? Did anyone catch on the call whether they will still report revenue and ASP by product? If so, can't we get units by taking revenue/ASP? If not... holy cow, they just became a whole lot more opaque. Revenue by product line seems extremely important in making an investment decision.
- muhneesh 8y agoI don't think they disclose revenue per SKU (e.g. XS, XS Max XR) - you would need sales by SKU / ASP to get unit sales
- MBCook 8y agoThey haven’t. People try to reverse engineer it from the ASP of all models combined.
- yeldarb 8y agoOf course. But will they say “$xx billion iPhone revenue, $y billion iPad revenue, $z billion Mac revenue” or “$(xx+y+z) products revenue” next quarter?
- muhneesh 8y agoThey will still disclose sales by device segment
- MBCook 8y agoThe numbers aren’t going to grow much, they’re close to saturation in the market. They probably don’t want to deal with all the ‘iPhone only grew 2% this year!!!!’ stories. If you don’t report numbers people can’t use your numbers against you.
- readitone 8y agoFrom years i am speculating about this thing: Apple is a service company. Computers/Tablets/Phones everything is just a locked box for profit. I don't mind profit at all. But clearly in my view so much money can be used to deliver something outstanding for a reasonable price. The Apple tax from the past was: More money for highest quality of hardware and software and unrivaled reliability. I loved this and not only used their products, i was evangelist for the brand. The Apple of today is a service company: The Apple tax is abomination and in my view disrespectful toward users. Slowing down hardware update cycles, making obvious bad design decision, locking down Mac Os step by step and blending it with iOS (there is no Mac Os software division). So shareholders are happy, management is happy, users are .... The fact that i can migrate to Ubuntu Mate after years of using Mac OS X speaks enough. I intend to evangelize the Open Source and Linux to the max. Software is the key to the Future of Human Kind and the idea that some monopolistic company wants control is ugly and old-fashioned. So if Apple wants to redeem them selves in the eyes of professionals here are some recommendations: Stop over-hyping every product. Understand that iOS is companion os. Stop 30 percent tax on developers, make reliable hardware again, fix Mac Book Keyboard, again fix it now. Stop overpricing the iPhone. But wait, who cares about this, obviously nobody. So sorry for my rant...
- proneb1rd 8y agoWat?
- charlesism 8y agoThe Apple of today is a service company No, they're a company who are nervous about where their growth will come from. They aspire to be a "Services" company, but unfortunately they aren't much good at it (see the usual list of failures. eg: Maps, Siri, etc). But "Services" is a nice murky bucket into which they can sweep various kinds of revenue, and still appear to be innovating. Do you remember this news story? https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/google-paying-apple-3-billion-to-remain-default-search--bernstein.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/google-paying-apple-3-billio... The key quote being "Google's licensing fees make up a large bulk of Apple's services business"
- 8y ago
- nodesocket 8y ago> Apple will stop reporting how many iPhones, Macs and iPads it sells each quarter, beginning with the December quarter, Apple CFO Luca Maestri said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. > "If you look at our net income during the last three years, if you look at our stock price in the last three years, there’s no correlation to the units sold in any given period." As a shareholder, this strikes me as a bit strange and concerning. Why stop reporting how many of each product you sold? It suggests that moving forward sales and business is going to decline and they are trying to be more opaque and hide this fact.
- IBM 8y agoIt will force the market to stop viewing them as a hardware company like Dell or HP and instead view them as the ecosystem company they are. That's why they're doing it.
- askaboutit 8y agoWe can all thank googles incredibly lack of privacy for Apple iOS success. I’m sure most people use an iPhone because it’s simple and because the value on privacy is greater. Other Android vendors should sue google for ruining any chances of actual competition.
- saagarjha 8y agoI think most people use iOS because they prefer it. The fact that iOS generally values privacy more is an added benefit.
- lern_too_spel 8y agoPeople use iPhones because they are status symbols. Android phones have been more useful than iPhones for many years now, and Apple is pushing the privacy angle as a way to divert attention from that, but outside of a few gullible techies, nobody is making purchasing decisions off of that marketing yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18359448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18359448
- brooklyntribe 8y agoAnd of course AH, AAPL crashing, down -14 already.
- jballanc 8y ago"Buy on the rumor, sell on the news" is a tradition for Apple's Quarterly reports going back to at least 2004 (by my own memory).
- chrisdhoover 8y agoBless this thread. May the gods of RSUs shine a bright light of good fortune.
- ksec 8y agoI wish Apple brings their iPhone Upgrade Program to outside US and Apple Cash to Outside US as well.